So Amazon has announced the availability of their e-book reader Kindle for, among other countries, Germany and Austria. The reader may be pre-ordered on Amazon.com, and will be shipped after October 19th. Costs? About 190€.

It’s good news for anyone who likes to read and especially good news for anyone who likes to read and be able to automatically download new books for a cheaper price than their physical brethren.

It’s bad news though for everyone who doesn’t feel too comfortable with the possibility of a company barging into your home and removing a previous purchase without warning (but with putting the purchase price back into your purse). Sound extremely weird and paranoid? Well, it’s not, because that’s exactly what happened a few months back.

Apparently a company had offered books on the Kindle marketplace for which it, as it turned out later, didn’t have the rights. So when Amazon discovered that tricky situation, they snuck into the Kindles of the people who had already bought the books and removed them. To add irony to injury, the books were “Animal Farm” and “1984″ by George Orwell.

And even though Amazon promised to not remove books in the future without warning, I’m a far too suspicious mind to really believe that. Because as long as they can, they probably will.

According to research I stumbled upon a while back (and which I’m now too lazy to actually look up, so you’ll just have to take my word for it), the Twitter web interface is still the number one place for people to update their Twitter account. Which to me was quite surprising, considering that the Twitter web interface doesn’t even automatically reload your Twitter stream, doesn’t have built in anything and lacks just about everything other clients have. In a nutshell.

To remedy that situation, Brizzly has stepped in. Basically, it’s a web client for Twitter, the difference is that it includes most of the features the clients we grew to love have had for a while (like TweetDeck). Which features, you might ask? Well, since last week, Brizzly automatically updates your Twitter stream, meaning you won’t have to click refresh in order to see new tweets from your followers. But that’s just the beginning, folks!

Brizzly also automatically displays pictures, videos and full URLs included in tweets, removing the ever so dangerous necessity to click into unknown territory via shortened URLs. And for those who are already absolutely overwhelmed by the number of messages their myriads of followers are shooting into the twittersphere, Brizzly has a grouping feature, which, I must say, really is handy as hell.

Good old Brizzer, as I already lovingly call it,  also includes a rather nifty sidebar tool for direct messages and also displays the newest Twitter trending topics in said sidebar.

To top it all off, Brizzly also supports several users, so if you’ve got a, say, private and corporate account, you can add them both and smoothly switch between the two. Just make sure you don’t confuse them, because, well, you wouldn’t want to tell your company’s followers every detail about your last bowel movement, would you? Come to think of it, I guess your private followers wouldn’t mind being spared that info as well. So please, do keep that to yourself, will you?

Anyway, Brizzly might not be the first alternative web-based Twitter client (there’s Ginx, which has been around for a while but is more bare bones than Brizzly), but it definitely is the most feature-rich. I do have to concede though that the overall design isn’t really that easy on the eye, but I’d rather put function before form, in that case.

Oh, and in case you’ve not clicked over to Brizzly yet, I might have to mention that it’s still in private beta. So if you want to get in right now, leave a comment detailing why you think I’m probably the most talented tech-writer in the long history of tech-writerdom, and I’ll send an invite your way. Good luck!

Tupalo.com, the Vienna-based service for what’s cool around your neighborhood, yesterday announced a partnership with Herold, the Austrian service for business listings.

It’s a great move for the little company and I’m really happy for them.

And while I don’t believe in things like good and evil, I do have a bit of a queasy feeling when it comes to Herold. Not so long ago, they were getting a thorough beating when they announced the availability of a CD-ROM that contained the data of more than 4 million private people. While it’s legal, people were and still are up in arms about it. Which I totally understand.

Now, while I do believe Mike from Tupalo when he announces on their blog that they “will still continue as the lightweight, independent company we’ve always been”, I wonder whether people will still feel the same way, now that a company with such a backstory is part of the game.

I’m convinced that from a business perspective, the partnership between Tupalo and Herold was one of the best things that could have happened to them. Whether it’ll put off users concerned about their private data and how it’ll be treated, remains to be seen.